This paper addresses the existing development trends, the generic architecture of IoT, IoT distinguishing features and possible future applications. The IoT is a hot research topic that is getting increasing popularity for academia, industry as well as government. Many European and American organizations and multinatinal companies are involved in the design and development of IoT to achieve different type of useful and powerful automated services [1]. The IoT has to face many challenges in its deployment specially in the field of security, governance and standardization that are also addressed in this paper.